


when you move, I move

by waitforhightide



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment
Genre: (no choking though), Anal Sex, Appropriate Amounts of Lube, Bondage Harness, Breathplay, Enthusiastic Consent, Improper Use of a GoPro Performance Chest Mount, Kink Negotiation, Light BDSM, Light Bondage, Light Praise Kink, Misunderstandings, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:37:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22219675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitforhightide/pseuds/waitforhightide
Summary: The GoPro harnesses look kind of like bondage gear, Ryan has a bad habit of muscling things around, Sara knows something but won't push, and Shane has to deal with all of these things at once.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej, Shane Madej/Sara Rubin
Comments: 40
Kudos: 135





	when you move, I move

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Yank](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18480496) by [siegeofangels](https://archiveofourown.org/users/siegeofangels/pseuds/siegeofangels). 

> This fic started last April and NOW IT'S HERE
> 
> Cheers to the ever-amazing angelsaves for the beta; bessyboo and cactusfl0wers for dealing with my constant complaining; and the entire disk orb for cheerleading throughout.
> 
> Title by [Hozier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSye8OO5TkM)

The first time they went on a ghost hunt wearing body harnesses for their cameras, Shane made a joke about it being a bondage thing.

“You know, like, make it out of leather instead and you’ve got a versatile look! Wear ghosthunting during the day and to the club at night!”

Ryan wheezed at him, eyes crinkling at the edges. “To the—you know, most of our ghost hunting happens at night, too.”

“To the club in the daytime, then!” Shane declared, holding the harness at arm’s length and squinting at it.

“You have no idea how to put that on, do you?”

“Not _no_ idea,” Shane objected, but Ryan had already taken it out of his hands.

“Arms out, big guy,” he said, and Shane obliged, before realizing he perhaps should have made some kind of joking protest, in case Ryan began to think he was easy to order around. Oh well. He stood still while Ryan got the right straps around the right limbs and torso bits, and Shane opened his mouth to thank him just as Ryan gave the strap encircling his chest a hard _yank._

“_Oh,_” was all that came out of Shane’s mouth instead. 

“Sorry,” Ryan said, still focused on the harness straps. “Should have warned you before I pulled at it. Here, let me do the other one?”

“Sure,” Shane agreed, wondering vaguely where all his smart-mouth instincts had just gone. Ryan gave the strap another tug and then stepped back to admire his handiwork.

“Feel okay?” he asked.

“Feels fine,” Shane agreed. Ryan slapped him fraternally on the back and then turned to get his own harness, and Shane fumbled in his backpack for a bottle of water to fix the sudden dryness in his mouth.

. . .

The thing about spending as much time around someone as Shane and Ryan spent around each other was that you developed your own shorthand—in texts and emails, in the way you spoke to each other, in how you told stories. Shane had noticed the same thing with a college roommate and with Scott, whenever they saw each other. Usually, this just led to dumb inside jokes and other people rolling their eyes when the two people in question went on particularly in-joke-heavy storytelling jaunts.

Sometimes, though, it led to you hollering “_Where’s the goddamn bondage harness, Ryan?”_ down the hallway of an overcrowded hotel full of Dance Moms and their overly-makeup’d eleven-year-olds. “Uh, sorry,” he said as several scowling middle-aged women clapped their hands over their children’s ears.

“I have it!” Ryan hollered back from his and Mark’s room, four doors down.

“Mine too?”

“Yes, Jesus, let’s just go, we’re late!”

They were. They had scheduled their B-roll and theory review for before the library they were filming at opened for the day, so they could be out before the children’s summer reading program met, at the request of the branch manager. The ungodly early hour and lack of proper caffeination were probably part of Shane’s abnormally socially-unobservant shouting. He didn't bother to stop and explain it to the aggravated Dance Moms, though, and he caught a mutter of “—wish they wouldn't be so _public_ about it!” as he fast-walked down the hall.

“You all good?” Ryan asked him as they tossed their gear into the van and climbed inside.

“You know it! Although,” Shane added after a moment,. “I think half the hotel thinks we’re fucking.”

“That we’re—Jesus Christ, we weren’t even in the same _room_ last night!”

“No, but I did shout at you about—what would you call it? Kink clothing?”

“Gear,” Ryan corrected as he scrolled through his phone. “Generally it’s kink _gear._”

“Oh ho _ho,_ you know this for a fact, do you?”

“Yeah, I—” Ryan glanced up and realized what he’d said. “I mean, I have the _internet,_ old man,” he insisted, but he wasn’t making eye contact. 

“I’m not—I’m not that much older than you!” Shane said, taking the diversion gratefully. They bickered semantics about their small age difference as they made their way to their haunted library, and if Shane felt heat crawling up the back of his neck, it was _not_ because he was imagining the particulars of his best friend’s possibly-kinky sex life.

He was gonna keep telling himself that.

. . .

Ryan was… much stronger than Shane. Shane had accepted this long ago with neither argument nor upset; he’d long accepted his role as the thin, tall, beanpole-esque nerd in his friend groups, and he really had no desire to make working out a _thing_ he was obligated to do. Sure, occasionally he was struck by the urge to do something physical, but he was more the type to go on a run or a swim or something else with an end goal than on a trip to the gym.

And honestly, most of the time Ryan’s strength was to Shane’s benefit. Ryan was happy to carry gear boxes or help move furniture or whatever other muscle-heavy task there was to do. He was the first to volunteer to help when Sara moved in to Shane’s place officially, and Shane had no doubt he’d be the first to volunteer the next time the two of them moved. He reminded Shane of some type of working dog sometimes—just plain thrilled to be able to put his skills to work doing something productive and not just lifting weights for the fuck of it.

The downside to this was that Ryan tended to just… grab and move without thinking. If something was in his way, he picked it up and shoved it over.

This often included Shane.

Like their steadily-building supply of inside jokes and references, their comfort level with each other had grown over time. They didn’t touch each other as often as, say, Shane and Sara, or Curly and anyone, but the lingering college-esque no-homo energy had bled out of both of them and had been replaced by a comfort of physical closeness Shane last remembered from early high school. Ryan had no problem with reaching out to adjust Shane’s shirt collar or pluck ghost hunter dust from his hair. Again, by itself, this was generally helpful. 

It was just that Ryan’s strength and touchiness combined into Ryan touching _Shane_ and kind of… pulling him around. A lot.

It started with Ryan’s strong, sure hand on his back, guiding him down one hallway as opposed to another. Then, Ryan’s hands would grab Shane’s shoulders or his much-less-sculpted biceps and just position him wherever it was Ryan wanted him for lighting or camera angles or because Ryan had just squeaked like a fucking dog toy at another wind gust and wanted Shane to suffer with him. Then at some point, several weeks after the morning Shane turned all of Montana’s Dance Parents against the two of them for all eternity, Ryan seemed to realize the harness was as good a grabbing-on point as anything and started hooking his fingers under the straps and yanking Shane around.

The first time he did this, Shane could only yelp in protest; the second time, he almost made a joking protest that Ryan was leading him around like a badly behaved dog—_But then he’ll stop doing it!_ a small voice in his head whispered. Shane didn’t give the tiny voice much thought, really… but he also didn’t make the joke about the harness-grabbing. _In case he stops,_ the voice whispered again. Shane silenced it. Life—including Ryan’s occasional tugs and pulls—went on.

Then Shane’s goddamn stupid giraffe legs fucked everything up.

Having been improbably tall for most of his life, Shane was pretty good at not stumbling over the ungainly amount of lower limb he possessed. It came with the territory, like not having enough leg room in Lyft cars or ducking more often than other human beings. Unfortunately, being tall didn’t necessarily exempt him from the occasional stumble, and as he’d joked before, “Falling sucks for me because I’m so much farther from the ground than most people.”

So when he felt the toe of his boot catch the edge of a crooked basement staircase wrong, he thought to himself, _Oh Jesus, here we go,_ and more or less braced for a gangly, unpleasant impact with the concrete floor.

Maybe he yelped, or maybe Ryan was just paying attention at the right time, but instead of skinning his knees and possibly his face, there was a sudden pressure on his chest, and he’d regained his balance as quickly as he’d lost it. He awkwardly hopped down the last two stairs and turned to thank Ryan for the catch when he realized the pressure of the harness straps against his chest wasn’t loosening. He felt the elastic strain, as if trying to imprint itself on him, and before he could so much as attempt to process this feeling, there was a loud _snap!_ and a shout and something grazed his cheek. The pressure was gone, and he was vaguely stumbling forward again, so he could either turn and see what had happened or possibly duck for cover.

“Jesus, Ryan, did you throw something a—” he started as he turned, but he choked off as he felt his camera fall from his chest and saw Ryan Bergara holding two-thirds of the chest harness in his hands, looking guilty.

“Sorry,” Ryan said. Shane gaped at him.

“Did you—did you fucking flex so hard you broke my thing?” Shane asked.

Ryan wheezed. “I didn’t—the plastic thing broke!”

“Yeah, because you _flexed too hard,_” Devon added from several steps farther up the narrow stairway. Shane barely heard Ryan’s response; he was too busy staring at the way the straps dangled from Ryan’s still-clenched fist, and the way that fist made the rest of his muscles bunch under the sleeve of his shirt. He felt the phantom pressure of the harness straps against his chest again, but this time he was thinking of the way Ryan Bergara’s motherfucking biceps looked. Something stirred in him, and he clamored for that mental boot-heel to trap it under.

“C’mere, let me—” Ryan said, reaching for what remained of the harness still attached to Shane.

“It’s fine,” Shane said, and he sounded too loud, even to himself. “It’s fine, I’ll figure it out.”

“Alright,” Ryan said, shrugging, and that was that.

. . .

Except that was not, in fact, _that._ Shane _thought_ it was—well, in between telling himself there was _absolutely nothing to think about_—until Ryan texted him on a Friday night several weeks later.

_hey can you come over & help me with something?_

_Probably, _Shane replied. _Elaborate?_

_working on some stuff for the next shoot, need to run it by you. nbd if you’re busy or whatever._

Shane glanced up at Sara, who was sketching something while a 90’s drama—Shane thought it was _E.R._ this week—played quietly in the background. “Hey, are we busy?” he asked.

“Hm?” she asked, tucking a curl behind her ear.

“Ryan needs me to go over and do something for Unsolved but only, quote, ‘not if I’m busy,’” he explained. Sara snorted.

“Well, _you’re_ certainly not,” she said.

“So it’s okay if I go?”

“Yeah, sure. Grab some coffee creamer on your way back?”

“‘Course,” Shane agreed, kissing her bare shoulder as he passed her. “Text you later.” 

_On my way, my excitable friend,_ he sent to Ryan.

Half an hour later, he was knocking on Ryan’s bedroom door, having been let in by one of the other roommates. He gave them a wave and let them get back to whatever they were doing.

“Oh, great!” Ryan said when he opened the door. “Perfect. Come in, look—” He gestured to his bed, where a tangle of black… something… rested on top of his comforter.

“What am I looking at here?”

“It’s a—look! It’s a camera harness!” Ryan held some of the black webbing up with one hand, obviously expecting Shane to have the same understanding of its loops and silver belt-ish buckles that Ryan himself did.

“I’m not—I’m not seeing it,” Shane admitted.

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Look,” he said again. “It’s like—” He tried to do something with the tangle in his hands but, apparently realizing two hands didn’t expand things well into three dimensions, let out an exasperated sigh. “Just—here!” 

And then his hands were on Shane’s arms, maneuvering him and posing him like a mannequin. Shane bit back the somewhat-contrived complaint and instead let Ryan slip the complicated system of black lines over his head. Its loose straps rested approximately where the GoPro harness had, but weren’t fitted to his body.

“Uh, Ry, I think this defeats the purpose of—” And then whatever else he was going to say died in his throat as Ryan stood behind him and yanked the straps through their buckles and the strong nylon tightened. Ryan fiddled with the harness and the straps around his chest and shoulders settled into a steady pressure, like a tight hug, and Shane focused on the surprisingly pleasant sensation of being _held_ somehow. Then Ryan—who was chattering, with no regard for his audience of one, about the materials he’d used, and why he’d decided to fuck around with alternative harness ideas—hooked his fingers under the lower strap on Shane’s back and _pulled._

The unforgiving strip of fabric pressed in just under Shane’s ribs, making his breath catch, and two things occurred simultaneously: one, he had a visceral image of the way Ryan Bergara’s prodigious arm muscles must be flexing; and two, he popped a fucking boner.

Ryan, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice, just kept narrating his thought process and snipping pieces of extra webbing off whatever arrangement he had going on the back. Shane took deep breaths through his nose and tried to recall the most inane historical events he could think of. It was only half-working. Just as Shane was trying to figure out a plausible lie to get himself out of Ryan’s apartment—_and out of this goddamn bondage harness,_ that traitorous voice in his head said—his phone pinged in his pocket.

_Oh thank God,_ he thought. He dug it out and then put on an exaggerated expression of concern.

“Everything alright?” Ryan asked, right on cue.

“Text from the girlfriend,” he said. It was no such thing, just a mailing-list email that had come through at the right time. Shane took a deeper breath than he normally would have, though if asked, he would insist it was to brace himself for manipulating Ryan (poor sweet summer child) and _not_ to feel the way the harness dug into his chest. “Sara just—she isn’t feeling great and asked me to pick something up on my way back. I’ll let her know when we’re done?”

“Oh, dude, that sucks. If Sara’s sick you should totally get her whatever she needs, this can wait.”

“You sure?” Shane asked, with a mental fist-pump of victory.

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

Shane was already reaching around to undo the buckles Ryan had so carefully been positioning. He wanted _out_ of the damn thing. Thankfully, Ryan didn’t seem to take offense, just said he’d keep working on them so they could have chest-mounts by the time they went out to film on-location for Supernatural again in a few weeks. Shane nodded and uh-huh’d in all the right places, but he didn’t hear a word Ryan said. He bolted like a frightened rabbit.

. . .

He drove home in a daze. So he had a kink. So he hadn't known about it until he'd experienced a non-sexual approximation—that wasn't _that_ strange. Human sexuality was a large expanse; it would be egotistical to think he had it figured out, even if it was his own. There was absolutely nothing wrong with having a thing for harnesses, or their component satisfying parts… like the way the black straps would look in certain light, or the feeling of the pressure around him; the idea that someone could pull him around— 

Okay. Alright. So… Harnesses. 

He stayed up scrolling after Sara went to bed that night. He Googled “harness” and was rewarded with lots of images of rock-climbing gear and some very cute dogs ready to go on adventures. He swallowed, glad no one else was around to hear the click in his throat, and tried “bondage harness” instead.

That was more like it. Most of the ones in the search results were made for cis women, from the look of it, and Shane was suddenly and briefly overwhelmed by the idea of Sara in the dark stripes of leather, the smooth skin of her thighs or the beautiful handfuls of her breasts pressed against the unforgiving material. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he always wanted to touch Sara. As a thought experiment, he replaced his mental image of his girlfriend in leather straps with one of her in pajamas, and… yeah, no, he still wanted to touch her, and would gladly do so in the morning, whether she was pajama’d or all dressed up. So maybe it wasn’t _just_ harnesses, maybe it was specifically about _wearing_ the harness?

He added “men” to the end of his search and found that his half-joke about the GoPro mount looking like bondage gear was not entirely inaccurate. Well, at least that gave him a reference point. He re-shuffled his thought experiment so that _he_ was in the harness—and if that harness was shaped almost exactly like the one Ryan had broken with his ridiculous arms several weeks ago, well, no one else was in this <strike>fantasy</strike> thought experiment to see it. He conjured an imaginary Sara, wearing nothing but a pair of lace panties he knew she liked, and thought of her straddling his hips, hooking her fingers under taut lines and yanking towards her— 

Heat pooled in Shane’s stomach and relief crawled up the back of his neck. _Oh thank God,_ he thought disjointedly as he reached under the blankets to palm his half-hard dick. _It’s a kink thing._

. . .

“You have a what?” Sara asked, turning away from the coffee maker mid-task.

“A, uh, a… thing,” Shane said slowly. “A kink thing. I think.”

“I thought Midwesterners didn’t have kinks?” she teased, turning back to the counter and dumping coffee grounds into the filter and sending the rich, warm smell of coffee into the slow Sunday air. “Also, I think it’s just ‘a kink.’ No need for ‘thing.’”

“Midwesterners absolutely have kinks,” Shane corrected, hand-waving at the semantics. “We just ignore them until they become hangups and/or repressed urges that take years of therapy.”

Sara snorted a laugh, and Shane grinned. He never quite got over the fact that he could make Sara laugh. He wanted to revel in it the way he was reveling in the comfort of making coffee on Sunday in his pajamas, four feet from one of the brightest, prettiest humans he had ever had the privilege to know. Sara, as if sensing his feelings, came up behind his chair and wrapped her arms loosely over his shoulder, pressing small kisses to the top of his head that trailed slowly down until they were nestled in the curve of his neck. Shane hummed contentedly. He had entirely managed to forget their earlier line of conversation when Sara’s breath ghosted over his ear. He shivered pleasantly and she said, voice low, “So, what kind of kink have you suddenly discovered?”

Shane felt himself blush and knew Sara could see it, or even feel it, with how close she was to him. “I, uh—well—I think—harnesses?” 

“Oh?” Sara didn’t sound surprised or like she was teasing or plotting, and that was… well, at least that meant he was driving this particular bus. Or whatever. Metaphors were hard, and he was tired and somewhat nervous. “Like… collars and leashes?”

“More like… leather and O-rings?” Shane said, still unable to take the questioning lilt out of his voice. 

“Hm,” Sara said neutrally. She pressed a soft kiss under his ear to show she was still listening and Shane dipped his head down to brush his lips across her knuckles. “On me?”

“On… No, on me.” He felt rather than saw her raise an eyebrow against his neck.

“Okay,” she said agreeably, running a hand through his hair.

“Okay?” Shane repeated, feeling like that corny YA novel the internet had briefly obsessed over.

“Sure. You wanna… do anything about that kink, friend? Or just felt like sharing?”

“Oh,” said Shane, noting vaguely that his coherency score was in the negative right now. Wet heat swam in his gut and he leaned his head back into Sara’s touch. “Uh…”

“Because if you want to be all strapped in—” She paused to pull him into an awkward, sloppy, hot-as-fuck sideways kiss. “—I’m all for it.”

“Yeah?” Shane gasped once their lips parted.

“Yeah. You’d look good in leather.” She pressed a kiss to his temple. “But you look good in anything.”

“I was just thinking the same thing about you,” he confessed, and as she slipped across the kitchen and out of his reach again, her joyous laughter mingled with the sound of the coffee maker in a glorious secular hymn.

. . .

He contemplated ordering a harness online, he really did, but the amount of options was somewhat overwhelming. He found himself scrolling through pages of search results and gear reviews and custom bondage harnesses on Etsy, which was somewhat unexpected, since he had always thought of Etsy as a place for, like, hand-knitted BB-8 hats, not very pretty and very expensive custom bondage gear.

And then, as it had a tendency to do, life just… got in the way. It wasn’t that he never thought of the camera chest harness ever again—he definitely did, more often than not with his hand around his dick—just that work happened and life happened and regular-but-incredible sex with Sara _sans _harnesses also happened, and he thought maybe it had been a passing fancy.

Until the night before the next Unsolved filming trip.

They packed the gear on Thursday afternoon so they could fly out to Boston and do a slew of New England haunted spaces through the weekend, which was how the jerry-rigged harness Ryan had been working on ended up in Shane’s duffel bag, and then in his hands as he shuffled through his luggage on his and Sara’s bed. 

“Huh,” he said.

“What’s ‘huh’?” Sara asked, flouncing in and flopping onto the bed with a bounce. She glanced up at Shane. “Shane! You didn’t tell me you ordered a harness!”

“No, I—it’s the—the GoPro thing Ryan made, for the New England trip.”

Something flickered across Sara’s face and Shane, already full of way too much complexity, didn’t try too hard to decipher it. Then it broke into a wide grin, and Shane swore the light flashed off her glasses in a way that was both intimidating and sexy, as if the lights themselves were egging her on. “You wanna break it in?” she asked, her voice sly and teasing.

Heat flushed Shane’s face, and he wasn’t sure if it was the harness, or Sara, or the harness _and_ Sara, but either way he grinned back. “Why, Miss Rubin! Are you suggesting we do _sex things_ in my _work clothing?”_

Sara snorted softly. “Not your _clothes,_ big boy. But maybe in this.” She plucked the harness from his hands and examined it, running the black straps through her hands. Then she pulled her hands apart and snapped the nylon together, making a sharp _crack _like a whip. Her grin widened, and she leaned across the bed corner to kiss Shane, long and hard. When he laughed, she pushed him back onto the bed with her small hands so she could hover over him with her slight frame, lavishing his face and neck with kisses and small nips of her teeth. He wasn’t embarrassed of the moan that she dragged out of him as she pulled away; he loved the way that she ruined him like this. She pulled his shirt over his head and kept his hands up towards the headboard with one of her smaller ones.

“Stay,” she whispered. He laughed softly. She let go of his hands and, with some help in the form of weight-shifts and wiggling, wrangled the harness somewhat awkwardly over his chest. The nylon felt plastic-smooth and the buckles were cool against his skin. It took her a moment to figure out how to tighten it, but when she did, the pressure of the straps made a hot throb start in his gut.

“Alright?” Sara asked.

“Perfect,” Shane agreed. He pulled her in and wrapped his hands in her hair, kissing her hard and hot. She licked into his mouth and then pulled back to paint a hot stripe along his jaw. He lost himself in the way she felt in his hands, soft and warm and sweet.

He fucking _loved_ sex with Sara. He loved the wet heat of her, the way she gave as good as she got, letting him wrap his hands around her waist but insisting that she set the rhythm. He loved the noises she wrung out of him, rough and stupid and exciting her more, sending them into feedback loops of horniness and sex and heat and need. 

He loved the way her hands gripped the harness and the way she used it to flip them over, roughly, hooking her fingers into the nylon straps and pulling herself up to meet Shane’s thrusts. His heart skipped a beat when her nails, longer than his and painted a vibrant acidic green, scratched at the skin of his chest. He kept waiting for the all-consuming heat to roll through him as the harness pressed against his skin, for his thoughts to condense to one bright spark of _yes wow this._

It didn't happen quite like that.

Sara was incredible. Sara fucking him was absolutely divine; it was _always_ amazing. The pressure and pull of the harness was new and interesting, and it gave them new angles and points of contact. When Sara pulled herself up with it to tuck her face into the crook of Shane's neck as she came, his own orgasm overtook him like an avalanche, and he was left reeling and buried in the way he loved her.

Several minutes later, when they'd had a chance to catch their breath, she asked, “Was that what you were thinking of? With the harness?”

Shane bit his lip and hummed his uncertainty. “I'm not entirely sure,” he admitted. He turned to Sara and kissed her forehead. “But you're incredible.” Sara made a pleased sound and tucked herself up against Shane.

“You wanna talk about it? The harness thing?”

“I… not… not yet.”

“M'kay,” she mumbled. “Let me know if something comes up. Or someone. You know, the usual ‘text me if you bone someone’ rules.”

“Of course,” Shane agreed. 

. . .

So it wasn't a harness thing. 

Shane was both willing to accept this and entirely baffled by it. He reviewed the sudden, achingly deep spikes of arousal over the past several months, and every single one of them had something to do with the goddamn GoPro harness. 

_Confirmation bias,_ he thought to himself as he plodded through his morning routine several hours earlier than usual so he could meet the Unsolved crew at the airport. _You thought it was a harness thing because you only looked at the harness part of the thing._

Okay, so he had to review the information again.

He did so as he mumbled a goodbye to Sara and lugged his suitcase down the steps and into his Lyft. The harness was an unmistakable element in this weird and sudden fixation, but it wasn’t the _only_ element. Perhaps it was just the newest one, the easiest to focus on. So, what were the other parts of this?

Cameras? That one was pretty quickly crossed off. He spent most of his waking life in front of cameras, and had not once gotten the heady, shaky arousal from having a lens pointed at him that he’d gotten because of the harness. 

Other people? Similarly to the cameras, that one was pretty easily debunked because he worked at _fucking BuzzFeed_. That and the fact that the one time an old girlfriend had tried to get him to have sex in a parking lot late at night, the mere idea of possibly being caught had killed his libido.

He was still puzzling through it—albeit very slowly, unaided by his usual dose of caffeine—as he met Ryan, TJ, and Mark at the airport and stumbled blearily through security. Then, as usual, life got in the way, and he lost himself in the familiar hubbub of fake-ghost hunting and all it entailed—rental cars, calls to check reservations, one million checks and re-checks of equipment and camera batteries. Shane thought of Sara as he changed shirts and caught the whisper of pain from last night’s nail scratches, but that was all; just a quick mental image of her smile and the green nail polish. They filmed their theory review under the camera lights in the living room of the haunted house while the sun was still up, since it didn’t matter for the “crawl through grime in the dark” aesthetic they usually went for, and honestly Shane was feeling pretty good. Confident. Loose. It was the feeling he got that came with doing something he was good at; something he had done often enough that it was hard work once, but effortless _now. _It was machinery slotting into place with a satisfying mental _click._ He knew, the way he sometimes did, that this episode was going to be a hit.

Then, partway through their midnight investigation of the various bedrooms (several hours and some dinner later), Ryan uttered a small shriek and grabbed the back straps of Shane’s camera harness, pulling him so hard he almost fell backwards into Ryan’s lap.

Whether it was that thought or the realization that Ryan’s design was super competent— it didn’t break like the original one—the result was the same: blood flamed in his face and then sank south all at once.

_Shit, no, not on camera!_ he thought.

He stammered something to Ryan about being insane as Ryan yammered on about the shadow he’d seen in the corner.

“Didn’t you—didn’t you see it?”

“Ryan,” Shane said, hoping for the first time in his ghost-debunking career that the viewers would contribute the hoarseness in his voice to fear.

“Yeah, whatever, man, I saw something,” Ryan insisted.

“_Fine,”_ said Shane, and it came out sharper than he expected. “Fine, can we just—where are we going next?”

Ryan was good at his job, so he didn’t let his face drop quite as much as Shane suspected he would have off-camera, but Shane saw the flinch in his eyes anyway. He felt bad immediately, but he also felt like if Ryan so much as _looked_ at him the right way, either Shane would come out of his skin or Ryan would somehow read his mind. Both options were unsavory. Thankfully, Ryan just rolled his eyes and turned to go back into the hallway and into the next bedroom.

_It’s fine, I’m fine, we’re all fine,_ Shane thought, mostly to give himself something to think of other than the phantom sensation of the harness pull. 

The next bedroom was the same as the first—dark, dusty, and empty. Ryan was shouting at the air, and Shane was pulling snarky ghost puns from whatever cache of them he kept in the back of his mind, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was on autopilot, and the best parts of him were focused on the way his heart was beating too fast and his chinos were uncomfortably tight. He tried to keep himself out of Ryan’s line of sight, but he also thought Ryan was probably too high-strung to notice much. What Shane was most concerned about right then were the cameras. He kept moving, trying to stay out of the way of all three of the large, professional-grade ones _and_ Ryan’s GoPro. But then he was looking at Ryan’s GoPro all the time, thinking of the harness, watching the metal fastenings glint in the dim light.

He was doing fine, he really was, until Ryan switched on the spirit box in a small pantry that was supposed to hold the spirit of a former maid. Shane grit his teeth against the grating sound, telling himself what he always told himself—it’s temporary, and the more annoying static there is, the less time Ryan will bother keeping it on. 

But then Ryan heard something in the jittering, skipping static and shouted about it, and he jumped in such a way that he backed up into Shane, who backed up into the wooden shelves of the closet in exactly the wrong way, so that no matter how he thought about it, he was sure at least one of the three cameras was going to pick up the tent he was still pitching in his pants. He was also about two inches from Ryan’s ass, in a pair of tight black jeans with ripped knees, and couldn’t fucking think straight.

He grabbed Ryan’s shoulders and pushed him away.

“Hey—!” Ryan objected.

“_Stop,_” Shane said, just shy of shouting. “Fucking—turn that thing off and let me out of this closet.”

“We haven’t—” Ryan started. Shane didn’t let him finish, just pushed past him and TJ and out the door, into the dark hallway and towards the less-dark entryway, where he found the bathroom they’d been allowed to use and closed himself in. He ran cold water into the sink, rinsed his hands, and dragged them down his face. He pressed forward uncomfortably into the edge of the counter, and thought, _I’m absolutely screwed._

. . .

The rest of the shoot went… fine. Not great, but fine. He apologized when he came out and the team accepted with shrugs and insistences that things were fine. Ryan graciously didn’t turn the spirit box back on, and Shane stopped trying to side-step the cameras after convincing his dick to calm the fuck down. He did, however, sidestep Ryan, and tried as best he could to keep out of arm’s reach for the rest of the night.

They finished up and no one on the production team said anything about weird footage or having to re-shoot, so they took ten minutes to have a snack and drink water and check their phones—all things that tended to be forgotten while rolling—before packing up. As soon as the cameras were off, Shane saw concern on Ryan’s face. He circumvented the impending questions by pretending he had a voicemail from Sara and taking his phone into the other room. He stayed there until he saw Mark packing lighting gear away and went to join him.

He timed his trips to and from the van so that he was always coming when Ryan was going. He kept his arms full of stuff and his mouth full of chatter to everyone but Ryan Bergara.

But eventually, there was no more gear to move and no one else in the house. Shane made the mistake of going back once more, thinking there was something else to grab. Instead, Ryan was waiting for him in the middle of the room. Fuck.

“Shane—” Ryan tried.

“Ryan, I’m—it’s late, I’m tired.” He turned to leave, hoping Ryan would just drop it.

Ryan grabbed the back of his GoPro mount and pulled him back.

It was entirely unlike every other time Ryan had grabbed him. He could tell Ryan had truly hooked his hand around the crossed straps in the back, instead of the usual one or two fingers he usually used when distractedly rearranging Shane around him. He hauled Shane back into the main room like Shane was—well, not nothing, but not the tall, gangly man Shane really was.

“Ryan, what—?” 

But he never finished the question, because instead of letting Shane go after he’d caught him and pulled him to a matching latitude again, like Shane had expected, he kept his hand around one of the straps and pulled Shane around so his back was against the wall.

Shane immediately felt like the entire room had dropped out from under him. He dimly wondered what he had done to make Ryan _that mad_,but it was the only semi-coherent thought that made it in before his brain fogged up like a car window on a cold day. He felt Ryan’s hand tangled in the nylon straps, the pressure across his chest, and the way his half-hard dick finally gave in after hours of nervous repression and grew hard and hot in his chinos.

“Ryan—” he tried, but his voice sounded raw, and he felt it. _Welp,_ he thought, and that was as far as he could get in the thought through the haze.

“I _knew_ it!” Ryan hissed.

“What?” Shane said dumbly.

“I _knew_ something was up, you’ve been twitchy for _weeks!_”

“I—”

Ryan disentangled himself from the harness, and Shane sagged against the wall. He knew he needed to focus, to apologize and figure out how to make things right with Ryan, to make him feel less uncomfortable, but it was late and he was tired and _god_ Ryan was so _strong_— 

Ryan poked Shane directly in the sternum. Yep. Sure was strong.

“Ow?” said Shane.

“You were—sorry—you’ve been avoiding me. And then earlier, when you got snappy, it was after I grabbed onto your GoPro!” There was an intense shine in his eyes, and Shane realized it wasn’t anger. It was _glee._

Shane scrubbed a hand down his face, noting his day-and-a-half stubble as he did so. As if following his hand, a small dollop of clarity was sliding through the brain-fog.

Ryan knew _something _about the harness thing, and wanted to confront him about it in an old house’s entryway where their coworkers would be coming into any moment to make sure they hadn’t bantered each other to death.

“Ryan—”

“Dude, don’t _deny_ it—!”

“I’m not _denying_ anything!” Shane said, and again, his voice was sharper than intended. Ryan fell blessedly silent, but there was no flinch of hurt in his eyes this time. That was better. It was good. “We gotta pack up and go back to the hotel. TJ’s gonna come looking for us and I’m _not_ doing this here.”

“Okay,” Ryan agreed, but there was still the shadow of a smirk on his face.

_Welp,_ Shane thought again, and this time the thought led to a more complete sentence. _I’m fucked._

. . .

The ride back to the hotel was excruciating, as far as Shane was concerned. He took shotgun and hoped the newest camera guy who had volunteered to drive—someone Shane didn’t know very well—was a focused driver and would want neither conversation nor an explanation for the way Shane had bundled his jacket into his lap and was sitting uncomfortably against the passenger side door.

The first thing he did was text Sara, although she was probably sleeping at the extremely early—or very late?—hour of 3am Pacific Time.

_shit Sara I fucked up_

Then he realized maybe that wasn’t the best thing to wake up to, whenever she did wake up, and sent a follow-up.

_Okay I’M FINE WE’RE ALL ALIVE but I think Ryan knows about The Harness Thing and i have no idea how that’s going to go_

_I’m exhausted and he’s got that “beat a dead horse then hunt its ghost” look on his face so wish me luck_

❤️

He tried to doze off with his head on his hand and his elbow against the door, but he was too nervous. He’d expected anger or annoyance or offense and instead, Ryan had his _gotcha_ face on, and Shane wasn’t sure why. Friendly blackmail, maybe? Leverage to make Shane do something he was adamantly against, lest Ryan make a few too many bondage jokes where other people could hear them? None of that was exactly in character for Ryan, but honestly, neither was him getting psyched about Shane’s sex life in any direction at all, so it was all Shane could piece together, tired as he was.

By the time they parked, his inappropriate work boner had thankfully abated, and it was cool enough that he shrugged his coat back on before helping the crew move the filming gear inside. They had never had a work van broken into, but they figured it was a good practice to stick to. By the time everything was sorted and they’d confirmed the timeline for the next day—late check-out at 2 and then a three-hour drive to the next filming location—it was almost 7 a.m., and Shane had that buzzy-under-his-skin feeling that came from being over-tired. He headed down the hall towards his room (he and Ryan got two solo rooms, when it was in the budget, or they ended up wanting to kill each other by the end of long trips) and was thinking of nothing but his bed.

Then he heard the unmistakable sound of Ryan’s footsteps behind him, hurrying to catch up, and felt like he had walked into a brick wall.

“Ah, shit,” he said quietly to himself, right before Ryan’s hand landed on his shoulder.

“So, we have a conversation to finish,” he said, sounding pleased.

“I’m so tired,” Shane said by way of response, but he didn’t tell Ryan _not_ to follow him into his hotel room, where his borrowed bed was waiting for him. He knew making Ryan wait until morning would just get him more worked up about it. So he ran his hand through his hair, dropped his phone and wallet on the hotel desk-table, and turned to face Ryan, who was hovering in the doorway. He had dropped his coat on the luggage rack and was staring expectantly at Shane.

“Just… fine, come in,” he agreed. Ryan did, looking like an eager puppy.

“So?” Ryan demanded, hands shoved in the pockets of his sweatshirt, hair sticking out wildly from the excitement of filming.

“So, what, Ryan?” Shane asked.

Ryan rolled his eyes. “So, you gonna talk about that?” He gestured vaguely at Shane with his hand still in his sweatshirt pocket.

“Which part? You’ll have to be more specific than that, Ryan, there’s kind of a lot of me,” Shane said. He didn’t mean to fall into the old joke, but it was a habit, and if it distracted Ryan somehow, all the better.

“Apparently,” Ryan agreed. “Based on what I saw going on under those chinos earlier.”

It was such an unexpected, bold statement coming out of Ryan’s mouth that Shane just stood there with his mouth agape. He’d expected to be wheedled at about the harness thing, cajoled into admitting he had A Kink Thing so Ryan could rib him about it, even accused of somehow doing it on purpose for the laughs or something. He had _not_ expected Ryan Bergara to basically say, _Yeah, hey, by the way, I was checking out your dick._

“I—look, I’m sorry, it wasn’t on purpose—” Shane said, unsure of exactly what he was trying to get at first. He felt a blush flame up the back of his neck, and he looked down at the hotel carpet so he didn’t have to see Ryan’s face.

“Which part?” Ryan asked. “The boner or the part where you keep letting me pull you around?”

The blush on his neck was now accompanied by an uncomfortable tightening in his throat. Shane glanced back up at Ryan, who was looking at him with mild curiosity. He ran a hand through his hair again. 

“I didn’t—I wasn’t—I didn’t know how to bring it up,” Shane said. “The harness thing. It just—it kind of snuck up on me and I didn’t want to make you, like, second-guess yourself.” This was not untrue, even if it purposely excluded the part where Shane had convinced himself it was fine because it felt so nice. “It took you so long to be, you know, comfortable with not having to ‘no-homo’ at me all the time. I didn’t want to fuck it up.”

“Uh-huh,” said Ryan. Shane couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic, and considering how transparent Ryan usually was with his emotions, that was somewhat off-putting. “So, were you gonna say something, or just let me keep giving you random boners?”

“It’s not—I’m just tired, Ryan, I—wait, _keep giving?_” Shane spluttered. “That implies the necessary fact of you previously giving me boners.”

Ryan made a face at Shane that Shane was too tired to properly decipher.

“Yes…?” Ryan said, as if prompting Shane to continue.

“It’s not—it’s not like I commonly film with my dick out, Ryan.”

“No,” Ryan agreed. “But I didn’t say it was from filming.”

Shane just boggled at him. “It’s not like you—” he started, but stopped short. He was starting to say, _It’s not like you regularly give me boners, Ryan,_ but he was confronted with the memory of Ryan’s arms and the pressure of the harness occuring to him so often in the shower over the past few months and shut his mouth. But it wasn’t like Ryan _knew_ about that, so what the fuck was he— 

“You’re talking about your apartment,” Shane said slowly. “Like, a few weeks ago, when you wanted to show me the harness.”

Ryan sighed exasperatedly, but his small, knowing smirk broke into a wider grin. “You thought I didn’t notice?”

“Well, I—you were so excited about all the specs of the design and all that, I thought you were distracted!”

“You thought I was talking about the load-bearing rating on the steel rings and webbing because I was geeking out?” Ryan asked, raising an eyebrow, and Shane just gaped at him again.

“You… weren’t?”

Ryan’s look of incredulity dissolved into surprised laughter. “Oh my God, dude,” he said. “We’re both fucking dumb.”

“...are we?”

“I mean, yeah, kind of. At least, I feel pretty dumb.”

“Okay, buddy, well, you’re the one with all the information here, so I feel like maybe I’m the ‘and dumber’ half of this pair.” Shane felt tired all over again and sat down at the edge of his bed. Ryan took the opportunity to move out of the tiny entry hallway to lean against the desk across from Shane.

“I put together the new harnesses with, like, weight-rated steel rings,” said Ryan. “So they wouldn’t break.”

“Yeah, _that_ part makes sense,” Shane agreed. “Since you fucking snapped the last one off me.” But thinking of that was a mistake, because now he was thinking of the lance of need that had shot through his gut then and every time he thought about it after. Including now. He dug his nails into his palm and tried to get his body to focus on something else.

“Well,” Ryan said, looking at Shane like he could chime in _any time now._ “Since it broke, and one of its main _purposes _is to pull you around, I made the new ones so I could more _effectively _pull you around.”

“I—main _purpose?_” Shane ran his hand through his hair again, very aware that he was probably starting to look almost as insane as Doc Brown in the_ Back to the Future_ movies, but he felt like he was understanding less and less every time Ryan said something. “Ryan, please start from the beginning. It’s both very late and very early, and I am _very_ confused.”

Ryan at least had the decency to look a little sheepish. “Remember the first time we filmed with the chest mounts and you—you made the joke, you know, about bondage gear?”

“Sure,” Shane agreed. 

“Well, I thought maybe you were speaking from experience. Like, I moved you a couple times accidentally and you never told me not to, so I just kept doing it, and I assumed you were gonna mention it eventually. Then I thought maybe I was wrong, so I just, like, forgot about it, until the day you broke the other one—”

“Excuse me,” Shane interrupted. “Your absolutely ridiculous _biceps _broke the other one.”

Ryan gave him a look, like, _See my point?_ but didn’t press. 

“You were distracted about it the whole time. You kept, like, pressing your hand to where the straps were. I thought maybe you were bruised, but you kept brushing me off, so I kind of put two and two together, I guess. I did a bunch of research and asked around when I made the new ones, and I was going to bring it up to you when you came over to test them out, but you got that text from Sara and bailed.” Ryan shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d, like, had second thoughts or were uncomfortable, so I dropped it.”

Shane blew a breath slowly from his pursed lips. The thought of Ryan doing research on this was both exciting and somehow terrifying. The thought of Ryan doing that research at the same time Shane had been doing his _own_ Googling and fantasizing about harnesses was a lot to process.

“So when you called me over to try the harness on,” Shane said eventually. “It was—what, a call-out? A booty call?”

It was Ryan’s turn to blush and stop meeting Shane's eyes. “I—I didn’t really know? I just kind of thought if I talked about the kink stuff in enough jargon, you’d catch on.”

“Because you thought I’d know all the kinky words?”

Ryan snorted a laugh. “Yeah, Shane.”

“...because _you_ know all the kinky words,” Shane said, eyes widening.

“_Yes,_ you weirdo!” Ryan was actually laughing again now. “Yes, I know all the kinky words. But I’ve never, like, tried to do kinky stuff with people I hadn’t met while doing _other_ kinky stuff, so I just kind of…”

“You threw them at me and hoped I’d recognize them.”

“Pretty much.”

Shane took a moment to consider this as Ryan shook his head and wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes. Then he sat up straight and planted his feet firmly on the floor. 

“Ryan, can you hand me my phone?”

“Sure?” Ryan agreed, but he looked concerned. “What for?” He was reaching behind himself for it while he talked but not looking away from Shane.

“I gotta text Sara.”

“About… about the kink thing?” Ryan asked, and he looked… fragile. “I didn’t know she knew. I can, uh, give her… tips… if you want…?”

Shane shook his head. “No, just, hold on.” He took the phone from Ryan’s hand and noted the way Ryan was studiously keeping their fingers from brushing. Shane opened his messages with Sara again and typed out quickly, _hey i love you i think I’m going to sleep with ryan_

_ps - it’s a ryan thing and not a harness thing_

He sent it without bothering to proofread, figuring she’d either get the gist or he’d correct his possible egregious spelling later, and then glanced back up at Ryan as he locked his phone.

“What did you tell her?” Ryan asked, his voice still too quiet.

“That I’m probably going to sleep with you,” Shane said.

“You—?”

“And that even though I loved fucking her while wearing the harness, I think it’s a you-thing and not a harness thing.” He said this with a boldness he wasn’t sure he felt, and the way Ryan spluttered and turned bright red was worth it.

“Shane, Jesus!” he choked. “Did you?”

“What, text Sara?”

“Did you and Sara—in _this_ harness—?”

“Sure did,” Shane agreed, and a hot streak of arousal burned through him at the memory of Sara rolling them over, half her weight suspended from the straps. He barely kept himself from gasping. Ryan, it seemed, was lacking the same self-control, because a punched-out sound came from his throat and his hands were clenched on the edge of the desk behind him so hard, his knuckles were white. Shane watched him take a few deep breaths, and then they made eye contact again, across the small distance.

“Did you actually tell her that?”

“Sure did,” Shane repeated with a small, sharp nod.

As if he was finally giving himself permission, Ryan’s eyes raked down Shane’s body, from face to long legs and back again to meet his eyes. Shane felt their progress like twin sunbeams through glass, warm and present. When they met Shane’s again, Shane felt the molten heat he’d been shoving back all night bloom in his stomach again, and when he took a deep breath of his own, he felt the straps of the camera harness on his chest under his jacket, where he had never taken it off.

“Are you gonna do it?” Ryan asked, and now his voice was low and gravelly. “Fuck me?”

“Depends,” Shane said. “You gonna make good use of your geeky kink gear?” He took his coat off and dropped it to the floor, letting Ryan see that the black nylon still criss-crossed the pale blue of his t-shirt.

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Ryan agreed. “Get over here.”

Shane grinned, and it felt almost feral. A combination of exhaustion, excitement, and arousal was making him feel high, daring, and more than a little wild.

“Make me,” Shane said.

Ryan was in front of him in a flash, all coiled muscles and warmth, and then Shane was being yanked towards him, and the harness was pressing taut and unyielding against his back. Ryan’s body was a wall of heat, and Shane thought he could feel him trembling slightly. Shane thought maybe Ryan would kiss him, but Ryan stood still for a moment, and then let him go.

Shane took a small step back. “Ry?”

“We can’t just—we gotta talk about it.”

“Ryan—”

But Ryan was shaking his head and holding his hands up. “Not a lot, dude, just—I know all the kinky words, remember?”

“Right,” Shane agreed. “Right, sure.” He thought he may have agreed to almost anything to make Ryan grab onto him again, but he didn’t. Ryan seemed to notice, because he grinned.

“Don’t lie to me, Bigfoot,” he warned, but his voice was teasing.

“I won’t,” Shane promised. Ryan held his gaze for a moment before deciding he must be cognizant enough.

“I’m gonna ask you a bunch of questions,” Ryan warned. “But you can interrupt me whenever you want. Assume whatever you’ve okayed is okay with me, too, unless I say so, alright?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Can I touch you?”

“God, yes.”

“Everywhere?”

A thrill ran down Shane’s spine at the implications of that. “Yes.”

“Kiss you?”

“_Yes._”

“Grab you?”

“Please do.”

“By your arms?” Shane nodded. “The harness?” 

“Yep.”

“Can I bite you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Choke you?”

Shane blinked. “Uh. Can I say maybe?”

Ryan laughed. “Yeah, dude, you can say ‘maybe.’”

“Okay, then maybe.”

“Can I fuck you?”

Shane heard the way Ryan’s voice shook, and saw that his pupils were dilated. Shane opened his mouth to say yes, then closed it again. He considered. “I want to say yes,” he admitted, glancing away from Ryan’s gaze, which was intense and distracting. “But Sara and I have some agreements about condoms, and I don’t have any.”

“I do,” said Ryan. 

Shane looked up again, surprised. “You do?”

Ryan shrugged, but he rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed. “You never know when you’re gonna get lucky, right?”

“I—no, I guess not,” Shane agreed, and the thought of Ryan packing condoms and maybe thinking of Shane made a weak feeling settle into Shane’s knees.

“So, rephrasing: can I fuck you, if I wear a condom and use appropriate amounts of lube?”

Shane snorted. “Appropriate amounts of—yes, please, fuck me with appropriate amounts of lube.” He chuckled and shook his head. “No, seriously though, yes. I—we can do that. If—if you want.”

“Okay. What are your agreements with Sara? Like, what—what should I know?”

Some of the certainty, the authority, seemed to have left Ryan’s voice, and Shane considered how strange it must be to ask someone whose partner you were _also_ friends with if you could take them to bed. “You might know all the kinky words, my friend,” Shane said. “But Sara and I know all the poly ones. So, uh.” He ticked things off on his fingers as he spoke. “We text each other when we’ve hooked up with someone new. Preferably beforehand. She and I are—we’re, you know, fluid-bonded or whatever, so we use condoms with other people until we can all get re-tested.” Ryan nodded in agreement and somehow that made Shane feel more comfortable. “Uh, we—we change the sheets? But that’s not super important right now, I guess. We’re gonna want to probably talk as a group if this, uh, if it… might keep going.”

Ryan shrugged. Whether he was thinking about the implications of a longer-term venture or not, Shane couldn’t tell. “Okay. I’m—uh, I’m fine with her knowing, you know, whatever. Whatever you want to share. It’s not like I don’t trust her, you know?”

“Duly noted,” Shane said. He was picking at the fingernails of one hand, and he felt his heartbeat in his throat. “Anything else?”

“Safe word?” Ryan asked.

“Uh, can we just assume I’m serious if I ask you to stop?”

“Sure, of course.” Ryan considered for a moment before cocking his head and reaching out to touch the soft fabric of Shane’s t-shirt. “How attached are you to this?” 

“To—to the shirt? Not very.” It wasn’t a cheap shirt, exactly, but it was one Shane only wore under other things, like jackets and button-ups, because of its thinness. Ryan grinned, and Shane saw that feral determination light up his eyes again. 

“Good,” he said, and then he was tangling his fingers in the collar and _pulling._

The thin fabric tore from the collar to the strap that crossed Shane’s chest, just at the lower end of his ribs, and Shane couldn’t hold back his gasp. He felt the warmth of Ryan’s fingers as they dragged across his skin, and it felt like they burned.

Ryan stopped, and Shane made an embarrassing, needy sound as Ryan took his hands away.

“Ry—”

“You have no right to be this hot,” Ryan breathed.

Shane, who felt very exposed and pretty scrawny in comparison to Ryan’s confident, muscled form, just glanced away from the eye contact. Ryan’s hands were on his naked chest then, and his breath was suddenly close and hot on Shane’s neck.

“Don’t argue with me, Madej,” he said, and then his mouth was hot on the juncture of Shane’s neck and shoulder, and he was pressing himself forward.

“I wasn’t—arguing—” Shane gasped, but it was useless and stupid. Ryan took the opportunity to tear Shane’s shirt the rest of the way down, yanking it up under the harness to get the bottom hem. Then he pulled it up awkwardly over Shane’s head. Shane raised his arms to help wriggle out of it, torn bits of fabric catching briefly in the harness, and Ryan tossed it away, 

Shane opened his mouth to say something—probably a joke—but then Ryan had his hands on the front straps, and this time, when he yanked Shane and angled him so his back was against the nearest wall, Shane had a _great_ view of his muscles. Then Ryan was shoving up against Shane with his mouth and hands and—oh my god, that was Ryan’s _cock_ pressed up against Shane’s hip— 

The arousal Shane had been shoving back for hours—days—_way too long_—suddenly flooded his bloodstream, scorching his skin and making his heart hammer. He kissed Ryan back like he’d forgotten how, all messy mouth and clashing teeth, but Ryan didn’t seem to mind. He met Shane with a searching tongue and scrape of his teeth across Shane’s bottom lip. When they broke for air, Shane’s head was spinning, and he thought if he wasn’t resting his forehead against Ryan’s, he might be too dizzy to stand.

“Oh my God,” Shane breathed.

Ryan laughed. “Good?”

“Great,” Shane agreed.

“Okay,” Ryan agreed. He moved one hand to the back of Shane’s neck, right at the base of his skull, and dragged his short nails over the soft hair there.

Shane’s knees finally turned to the jelly they’d been threatening since Ryan had accosted him in the old house several hours ago. Between excitement and exhaustion and sheer mind-clouding arousal, his body just decided it wanted to _drop._ He braced himself for a stumble, thinking of that time he had tripped down the stairs, and then there was pressure under his ribs, right over his diaphragm, and he realized that Ryan was holding him up against the wall by the straps at his back and cutting his air off in a way that went straight to his dick. A ridiculous, embarrassing, filthy noise came from him, and he braced for Ryan’s joke about it.

Instead, Ryan tightened his grip on the back of Shane’s neck and used it to tilt his head back, baring his throat and its late-night stubble, and turned to back Shane up with trembling legs to the edge of the bed. Shane went down like a rock with a small, breathless _Oomph!_ as Ryan dropped the strap and the pressure on his chest loosened. He sucked a long, deep inhale through trembling lips.

“Good,” Ryan said softly, and it sounded more like he was talking to himself than Shane. It didn’t matter; it went straight to Shane’s gut anyway, and he leaned forward to press open-mouthed kisses to whatever part of Ryan was closest. It turned out to be the soft cotton of Ryan’s shirt at the top of his belly, not far from where the harness strap cut across Shane’s own chest, and he nuzzled in there like it was the best thing he’d ever pressed his face against. When Ryan chuckled, he felt the vibrations in his cheekbones, and that just made it harder to think straight. Then Ryan was pulling him back by the nape of the neck again and making Shane look up to where Ryan loomed over him, legs bracketing Shane’s.

Shane tugged at the hem of Ryan’s shirt. “Off,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, please.”

“Well, since you asked so _nicely,_” Ryan agreed, and then he was pulling his shirt off over his head and unbuckling his belt before Shane even had a chance to properly admire the way his muscles tensed and shifted under the smooth tan skin. Ryan tossed his clothes away, and Shane was exactly the right eye-level to see the way the hair below his navel trailed down into his boxer-briefs, which were a dark red and somehow unspeakably attractive. Part of that was probably because the hard, obvious line of Ryan’s cock was visible, with a wet spot at the tip, just below the elastic waistband. 

“_Fuck,_” Shane groaned. “Ryan—”

“Like what you see?” Ryan asked, but Shane thought he heard some self-consciousness in his voice.

“Ryan, you’re—you’re so _wet,”_ Shane said. His voice was wrecked, and Ryan had barely touched him. He looked up at his friend, very aware suddenly that he was maybe three inches from Ryan’s cock with only a layer of cotton between them. He sat back slightly so he could see Ryan’s expression better. “Are you—is this—are you okay?”

“You’re breathing on my dick and you think I’m not okay?” Ryan asked, and he looked and sounded so openly incredulous that Shane laughed. The heat of his breath must have actually done something, because Ryan shuddered and scritched his nails against Shane’s neck again. “Why are you wearing pants?” Ryan asked.

“Dunno,” Shane said. “You gonna take ‘em off me?”

Ryan responded by pushing Shane back roughly so he was lying back on the bed, then grabbing his belt-loops and tearing off his pants. They slid down his thin hips pretty easily, but they took his boxers with them, so Shane’s flushed and aching cock sprang free and slapped loudly onto his stomach. 

“Oh _God,_” said Ryan. His eyes raked up and down Shane’s body again, and Shane realized how he must look, scruffy and frazzled and sweaty with blown eyes and only the camera harness still pressing into his skin. Before he could decide how he felt about that, Ryan grabbed the shoulder straps and hauled him up across the bed, straddling his hips. He let go of the harness to lace his fingers with Shane’s and drag Shane’s hands up over his head. Ryan’s arms were shorter, so Shane’s stayed bent at the elbow, but just the pressure of being held there was enough for Shane, whose hips bucked up. He wasn’t even really thinking, just seeking heat and friction, and the rough drag of Ryan’s underwear over his own erection sent sparks off behind Shane’s eyelids.

“_Ryan,_” he said. “Ryan, Ryan—” He thought he could say Ryan’s name a thousand times, and it would never get old. 

Ryan didn’t seem to mind. He just bent forward and latched onto the pulse point under Shane’s jaw. Ryan sucked a spot there that was _definitely _going to bruise, and that was a great thought. Then Ryan pulled away and seemed to realize the same thing. He planted a gentle kiss there to soothe it.

“Sorry, I—should’ve asked about marks—”

“Mark me up, baby,” Shane said. He meant to sound goofy, but instead he just sounded weirdly sultry. It wouldn’t have worked if he’d been trying for it, but it did something for Ryan, who moaned and ground down against Shane’s pelvis. One hand was still holding Shane’s down; the other came down to adjust himself in his underwear. His knuckles brushed against Shane’s cock as they did, and Shane chased the feeling desperately.

“Ryan, Ryan, I need—please—”

Ryan brought his hand back down, more deliberately this time. He ran the palm of his hand over Shane’s slit, and Shane swore and arched off the bed.

“Jesus God,” he said, sounding strangled. Ryan chuckled again and used the precome he’d gathered on his hand to grip Shane’s cock and give it a few tentative strokes. “Oh, Ryan, oh my _God—_”

Ryan let go of Shane’s hands to adjust his own position, and Shane took the opportunity to reach between them and drag the pad of his thumb down the outline of Ryan’s cock through the fabric. Ryan shuddered, and his grip on Shane’s own cock seemed to spasm in time with it.

“Why aren’t you naked?” Shane asked breathlessly.

Ryan let go of Shane and leaned to kiss the ridiculously sharp jut of Shane’s right hip to delay answering. “Afraid without them I’ll come too damn fast,” he admitted. 

This drew another helpless groan out of Shane, and Ryan grinned and laved his tongue over Shane’s hipbone again. Shane left him to it for a minute, letting him trail small bites and wet kisses across Shane’s abdomen. In return, Shane gave Ryan’s cock the barest hint of pressure, enough to get his hips rolling but not much else. He lost himself in it for a while—the feeling of Ryan’s hands on him, the electric thrum of the energy between them, the sense of hovering at the apex of a roller-coaster the split second before it plunged towards the ground.

_So this is what it feels like to be in love with your best friend,_ he thought, and the idea brought such an intense wave of desire through him that he honest-to-God _whined._

Ryan slid back up his body until they were kissing again, hot and slow. When Ryan pulled back, Shane chased him with his mouth. Ryan pressed him back with two fingers over his mouth, as if shushing him. Shane fought the impulse lick them, and then thought, _fuck it,_ and surged up just enough to suck Ryan’s fingers into his mouth up to the middle knuckle. Ryan’s gasp of surprise was worth the impulse, worth it a hundred times over—he seemed to forget to breathe. His face was a mask of shocked pleasure, and Shane felt the way his hands trembled against his own tongue. When Ryan pulled his fingers back, he dragged them over the wet swell of Shane’s lower lip, and Shane felt like he might die from it.

Either Ryan saw it in his eyes or was just at the limit of his own restraint, because he ghosted his hand down Shane’s stomach to where his cock rested, hard and desperate to be touched, and then down the inside of his right thigh and up again to press his thumb gently to the space between Shane’s ass and his balls.

“Ohmyfucking_God_.” It could have been one word, it was so smashed together. There was lightning coursing up Shane’s spine, and he swore his cock was spilling enough precum onto his stomach that there was an actual puddle there. “Ryan, Ryan, please, _please—”_

“Do you want me to finger you?”

Those words were so unheard of that Shane had to take a second to process them so they lined up into something intelligible in his brain. 

“Or,” Ryan said, perhaps taking his silence as hesitation. “I am more than happy to be fucked. Like, don’t—don’t think me wanting to haul you around means I am unhappy with the idea of your cock in my—”

“Ryan, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to fucking lose my mind and possibly come before we make a decision about this.”

“...oh. _Oh._”

“I would really, _really_ like you to finger me, Ryan,” Shane said, his voice strangled. “And then I would very much like you to fuck the living daylights outta me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Ry, absolutely.” Shane’s eyes were still tightly shut, but he heard Ryan rummaging in his coat across the room. “You keep your lube in your _coat?_” Shane asked.

“No, I keep my lube in my toiletries bag, but I had it in the van. I grabbed it earlier.”

“Ryan Bergara, how scandalous! Having your sex tools on a work trip!”

“Would you rather I _not_ have my lube?” There was the sound of a cap popping open, and Shane opened his eyes in time to see Ryan had finally eschewed his underwear and was slicking up his first two fingers. The lube caught the early morning light and was somehow beautiful. He absolutely did _not_ say that out loud, but he did reach out to grab Ryan’s elbow and bring him back to the bed.

“Listen,” Shane said. “I am so fucking thrilled right now that you’re still in your twenties and think any deviation from your day-to-day might mean getting fucking laid, because this means _I’m_ getting _fucking_ laid.”

Ryan grinned widely, dropped one ridiculous wink, and then knelt down and pressed his finger to Shane’s hole. The lube wasn’t quite body-warm, and it made Shane shiver. “Still talking about my sexual optimism?”

“Nope,” Shane said. “Nope, nope, not talking at all.” He wished Ryan would just finger him already. He wanted— 

Ryan’s finger pushed into him, and Shane lost all sense of everything except _warm_ and _stretch_ and _Ryan_. He was good at it, Shane thought disjointedly as Ryan thrust gently into him. He added a second right before Shane was about to beg for it, and then he was thrusting deeper and curling his fingers. Shane swore and wrapped his fingers tightly around the base of his cock to keep from shooting off in Ryan’s stupid sexy face.

“You feel good?” Ryan asked, smug.

“You fucking know I feel good,” Shane growled. “Ryan, God, I—”

“Put your hands up.”

“What?” 

“Above your head. Put your hands up, where they were before.”

“Ryan, if you keep touching me like that I’m gonna—”

“Don’t.” Ryan reached his free hand up to give the horizontal strap of the harness a yank. “Not yet. Not until I say.”

This made an impossible heat spread through Shane’s stomach, and he swore he was going to come anyway and ruin the whole idea, but he managed—barely—to hold back, and gingerly let go of his cock to stretch his arms up above his head. As soon as he did, Ryan made a satisfied sound in his throat and scissored his fingers, and Shane’s hips bucked wildly up from the bed. Ryan moved his hand from the harness to Shane’s lower belly and pressed him back down against the mattress.

“So good, Shane,” he said.

Shane couldn’t breathe; he was flash paper and he was going to ignite and disappear. He had been thinking of sex like this for _months,_ and not once had he let himself picture it like this: Ryan’s hand splayed on his stomach, tousled hair visible over the hard arc of Shane’s cock, Ryan’s fingers working Shane open like he was a a destination whose journey was just as good. Shane tried, just for a second, to fit the incandescence of this moment into the rest of his life—Unsolved, BuzzFeed, his too-small apartment where he and Sara had discussions about what brand of dish soap to buy—but he couldn’t do it. He was afraid if it touched the rest, it would find the frayed edges of the rest of his life and set them ablaze.

“Ryan,” he gasped. “Fuck me, or I won’t last.”

Ryan’s fingers stilled in him, and Shane grit his teeth. “You ready?” Ryan asked.

“Never better,” Shane said. “_Please_ fuck me.”

Ryan made a pleased little sound and then his fingers were moving—not inside Shane, but out of him. “I can’t resist you saying ‘please,’” Ryan said. He snapped the lube open again and Shane filed that factoid away for later. “How do you want me?”

Shane had a microsecond of decision paralysis, where he was sure he would just not be able to say anything at all. Then he said, “Can I—my hands and knees—?”

“You sure? This isn’t a thing where you can’t look at me _during,_ is it?” Again, Ryan was trying to make it sound like a joke, but Shane knew him too well. He heard the tremor in it.

“Ryan,” he said, grasping for the last of his coherence and patience. “I will let you fuck me six ways from Sunday whenever you want, but right now I want you to fuck me face-down into the mattress while you manhandle me with this fucking harness.”

“Oh, Christ,” Ryan moaned. It was apparently convincing enough, because Ryan turned away and a moment later Shane heard the crinkle of a condom being opened. Then, the wet sounds of Ryan’s lubed hand on his own cock. Shane wished he could see it, but he was busy flipping over and finding the best angle for his abundance of limb. He was acutely aware of the harness again as he was changing position—the way it dug into his back as his shoulders flexed, the pressure on the strap under his ribs as he bent down. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he must look like a disaster. It was bumfuck early in the morning, he had gotten no sleep, and he was at least eight years older than he’d been the last time he remembered someone asking to fuck him face-down-ass-up. His joints were proof of that, if nothing else. But before he could get stuck in self-consciousness, Ryan’s hands were on his hips, moving him decisively. Ryan pressed his fingers so hard to Shane’s hips that Shane thought they might bruise, and he was entirely okay with it. Then Ryan rutted up against Shane, his cock teasing and not even close to enough as it slid against Shane’s tailbone, teasing at his cheeks.

“_Ryan,_” he pleaded.

“Yeah, Shane, fuck,” Ryan said. The head of his cock was blunt and warm against Shane, and then he was pressing in slowly. Only the way he was grabbing Shane’s hips, his hands so tight his knuckles were probably white again, betrayed the fact that he was fighting to hold back and not just taking his goddamn sweet time for the fun of it. Shane thrust back against Ryan as hard as he dared, and if it hurt a little, well, he was out of practice, and it would be worth it in a second.

Ryan finally let go of whatever was keeping him gallant and slow, and let go of Shane’s hips to grab the X-crossed straps at the back of the camera rig. He used his angle to pull Shane back and up at the same time, and the change in angle had his cock slipping against Shane’s prostate. 

Shane lost the thread there. Things were bright and hot and entirely overwhelming. He could have been asked the most basic of questions and not come up with an answer. There was nothing other than the sensory: the smell of clean bedding in his nose; the sound of Ryan’s skin slapping incredibly against his own; the feeling of the harness digging into his skin, tight against his diaphragm again; the way bursts of white light were exploding behind his eyes like fireworks in time with Ryan’s thrusts deep and hard into his ass. It was too much to catalogue. He felt like everything he noticed was happening by itself, until he noticed the next thing, like the fact that Ryan’s sex groans sounded a lot like his workout groans, or that Ryan had loosed his grip on the harness straps to reach around and clumsily stroke Shane’s cock.

“Ryan,” Shane gasped. “I’m close—so close—can you—?”

“Yeah, _fuck_, Shane, whatever you want.”

“Pull. Hard.”

Ryan’s hand tightened on Shane’s dick momentarily before he parsed what Shane meant, and then the wonderful friction on Shane’s cock was gone and there were two hands in the harness again.

“Hard?” Ryan checked.

“_Yes,_” Shane begged. He brought his own hand to his cock and wrapped it in a loose ring. 

Ryan pulled.

It was everything, magnified. Shane’s deep inhale was trapped in his lungs, and his already-hammering heart kicked up another notch. His pulse pounded behind his eyes and made him feel light-headed. He tightened his grip on his cock and fucked into his hand in a frenzied, staccato rhythm.

His orgasm bloomed in his gut like a fireball, and he had barely enough time to notice it was approaching before it annihilated him. It ripped through his body and made his ears ring. It was everything happening at once, a Big Bang of need and pleasure and desperation.

He came over his hand, onto the hotel comforter; he came so hard that he felt hot wetness on his chest, even angled the way he was. Ryan held the harness tight until he felt Shane’s body go lax and loose. Then he let go to grab Shane’s hips again. His grip was vice-like, and he thrust forward into Shane wildly two, three, four times before a ragged, belly-deep moan was torn out of him and he was coming too, still fucking into Shane’s ass until he couldn’t stand it anymore and leaned floppily forward to drape himself across Shane’s back. They stayed like that for a minute, heaving deep breaths, letting the sweat cool on their skin, before Shane said, “Ryan, I need—my knees—”

“Mmm,” Ryan agreed. He pulled out slowly and then flopped onto his back on the bed. Shane let himself lie down on his stomach; the stains on the blanket were already mirrored on his chest anyway. No need to smear it across his back. They stayed like that for a moment, side by side, catching their breaths.

“We should clean up,” Shane said eventually.

“Ugh,” Ryan said. Shane laughed. He forced himself to get out of bed and to the bathroom, where he ran warm water over clean hotel washcloths. He used one to wipe himself off in the mirror, then brought the other one back to Ryan, who was tying up the condom and tossing it away.

“Oh, thanks.” Ryan took the washcloth and then grabbed Shane’s hand before he could walk away. “Here, let me—” He reached around and loosened the harness straps so Shane could pull it up over his head. It left rough red marks across his chest. Some were so intense that he could see the weave pattern of the nylon.

“Wow,” Shane said.

“Good?” Ryan asked.

“The marks or the sex?” Shane teased. He loved the flush that spread across Ryan’s face and down his chest.

“Both?”

“Both,” Shane agreed. He took the opportunity to strip the comforter off the hotel bed as Ryan went to retrieve his underwear. “Right or left?”

“Hm?” 

“Bed,” Shane said. Now that the endorphins had started to wear off, he felt the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has been up for almost 24 hours. He wanted to sleep until TJ came and dragged his sorry ass out of bed by force.

“Oh,” Ryan said, sounding surprised. “You want me to stay?”

“I want to sleep,” Shane said truthfully. “But secondarily, yes, I want you to also sleep. Here. If you want.”

“Yeah, alright. Uh, I’ll take the door side?”

Shane nodded but didn’t say anything else, just found his phone charger in his suitcase pocket and plugged it in on the nightstand on his side. When the phone lit up to say it was charging, he saw texts from Sara.

🥳 🎉🎊

_So glad you finally went for it, babe. Love you so much. Polycule dinner when you guys get home??? Ryan can pick the place._

_PS - I KNEW it was a Ryan thing, didn’t you?_

He chuckled as he made sure his alarm was set for as late as he dared the next morning.

“What’s up?” Ryan asked, returning from the bathroom. His glasses were on now, and Shane reveled in the rumpled, domestic look of him.

“Sara wants to know if you’ll have dinner with us when we get back. Like. Poly-group dinner.”

Ryan’s surprise was quickly replaced with a grin. “I mean, I don’t regularly tell her ‘no,’ she’s too persuasive. But, uh… yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “I’d like that? I think?”

“I’ll tell her,” Shane said, turning off the bedside light. “In the morning.”

Ryan climbed into bed next to him and turned off his own light. The room was suddenly, blessedly dim despite the full daylight sun trying vainly to breach the standard-issue hotel blackout curtains. Right as Shane started well and truly drifting off, he felt Ryan’s hand, warm and soft, tracing the texture of the nylon imprinted on Shane’s back.

“You think we can actually do that?” Ryan asked. “The poly thing?”

“Dunno,” Shane said sleepily. “But we’ve got a whole trip to figure it out before we go home.”

“Mm,” Ryan agreed. He shifted around and then slung his arm over Shane’s chest possessively, pulling Shane back into his warmth. “Night, Shane,” he said.

“Mhm,” Shane agreed, already drifting off. The last thing he was aware of was the way Ryan’s arm held him close and tight.

_It’s _always _been a Ryan thing,_ he thought, and he finally fell asleep with a ghost of a smile on his face.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote Sara calling Shane “big boy” LITERALLY 24 HOURS before Ryan called Shane that on-screen in the Florida machete murders so, I’m not saying I’m psychic, but I _am_ saying they should keep on bringing the primo content.
> 
> Editing my own, old note from my drafts to add: since then we’ve gotten nipples, “Shane’s not my Daddy,” and the entirety of Watcher, so. Uh. -two thumbs up-
> 
> There MIGHT eventually be a sequel to this so, subscribe to my author alerts or find me on [Twitter ](http://twitter/com/waitforhightide) if you wanna catch that at some point.


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